Fanmail Q & A: Coolness

It’s been a while since I answered an e-mail from a reader. How about we do that?

Pat,

I just wanted to say I’ve loved The Name of the Wind for over a year now, but I just recently found your website. Your blog has kept me laughing for almost two solid weeks as I go back and read the archives. That’s something I’ve never done with a blog before.

Even better, your fundraiser was seriously amazing this year.

Seriously, how cool are you?

Jake

Jake,

You strike on a topic I’ve been curious about for some time. How cool am I?

As I’ve mentioned before in the blog, growing up, I wasn’t one of the cool kids. But things change, and these days geek is chic. I’m willing to admit to the fact that these days, I might actually be a little cool.

Your letter poses an interesting problem though. If you’d simply asked, “Are you cool?” I could have gotten away with answering “maybe” or “kinda.” But you’ve asked for a _degree_ of coolness. What’s more, you’ve requested that I *seriously* consider the problem.

That means we need to use science and shit. We need quantifiable units of coolness that we can plug into formulas. We need to be rigorous.

Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, the BIPM hasn’t established a standard unit by which we can measure coolness. I can’t just tell you that I’m say, 85 pascals of cool. Or 158 newtons. Or whatever.

That means if we want to determine how cool I am, we have to measure me against some sort of universally accepted standard of cool. We need to develop our own yardstick, as it were.

So, let’s pick two people who are undeniably cool. The king and queen of geek cool: Felicia Day and Neil Gaiman.

Now we need some numbers. While popularity isn’t quite the same thing as cool, you have to admit they’re closely related. Since I don’t have access to things like book sales or website hits, we’ll have to go to the lowest common denominator: Facebook.

(Yes, I know. Technically, Myspace would be the lowest common denominator. But there’s only so low I’m willing to go, even for science.)

A quick search of fan pages reveals the following stats.

Felicia: 192,000 fans.

Neil: 90,000 fans.

Me: 10,000 fans.

Now we could stop here and say, that I’m about .05 as cool as Felicia. Or that I’m roughly .11 of a Gaiman. Or something like that.

But drawing data from only one source strikes me as slipshod. To round things out, why don’t we take a look at Goodreads rankings?

“Takest not that tone with me,” Russian-dictator-looking-Rothfuss glowers from above. “Lest I crush you with my manly, blue-lit beard.”

“Bring it Hagrid,” he replies. “I’ll beat you like a redheaded stepchild.”

“What are you going to use?” I say. “Your kung-fu grip? Hell, you don’t even have any elbows!”

Wait… Sorry, what was I talking about again?

Oh. Right. Coolness. I guess I lost a few points just there.

Anyway, as you can see things stand like this:

Me: 383 friends, 308 people following my reviews.

Felicia: 2,710 friends, 380 people following her reviews.

Not pictured above, Neil Gaiman sits at #1 on this list. Topping the chart on a mountain of cool with 5,175 friends and 3,133 people following his reviews.

Let’s just combine these for simplicity’s sake:

Gaiman: 8308

Felicia: 3090

Me: 691

Because the Facebook numbers are really high compared to Goodreads, we have to normalize them by multiplying by .045. (Don’t ask how I got there. It’s boring. If you understand statistics, you know how it works.) That gives us:

You still with me? Now we have to create our yardstick for the measurement of geek-coolness. Imagine if Neil Gaiman and Felicia Day were somehow alchemically combined into one creature. Some ubercool, sexy, hermaphroditic, webisode-creating, rockstar, gamer, author thing.

I think it’s safe to say that godlike creature would be the ultimate amalgam of geek cool.

So if we add together the scores of Neil Gaiman and Felicia Day, we get roughly 100,000 units. These I hereby term Gaiman-Day units. They will hereafter be used to determine how cool someone is. 100,000 Gaiman-Day units is the coolest you can be without collapsing into some manner of singularity.

So there we go. Now we have a way to quantify how cool I am, Jake. I am exactly 1232 Gaiman-Day units of cool. Only about one percent as cool as it’s possible to be.

102 Comments

I’m not sure that combining Gaiman and Day’s scores creates a good baseline. Aren’t you saying that Neil is only living up to 60% of his potential coolness? (And we all know the extent of your mancrush on him.)

The only way to even get a passing score on this scale is to sew together some sort of nightmarish Gaiman-Day conjoined twin hybrid. (It would start out with a score of 100,000, but would shed a bunch what with the lurching and shared circulatory system.)

I think you need to start with small units, and work your way up from there. For example, I estimate you are 16.7 Hasselhoffs. Unfortunately, that means in Germany you’re a fraction.

Hehe, by the way, I started reading your book aloud a while back to one of my friends. Now I have a merry little group of followers who gather every night to hear me read The Name of the Wind, brutally butchering the Russian accents I substituted for Caeldish (I have no real-world references to go by here, I do with what I can) :D

Congrats on the fundraiser – I was sick with brokecollegestudentitis, but I am going Army in a few weeks and I will be sure to set aside a goodly portion for the Worldbuilders next year.

Best of luck on the next book – knowing my luck though it will come out after I finish training and am stuck in B.F.E.

By the way, you need to give yourself at least 2,000 Gaiman-Days for finally, quantifiably,create a system of nerd-cool measurement.

Wow Pat! You never cease to amaze me. You made an error though, your lego-wheaton conversation added to your coolness not subtracted from. That conversation had me laughing out loud here at work. At 3:07am when everything is dead silence in the office and I bust out laughing it brings a lot of attention.

I wasn’t even going to try to explain to them what I was laughing about! ;)

Ahhh~, wait a moment, Pat. You forgot to add some points for your self. You need to add points for you kickass fundraiser, epic author picture (yes, i think you should get points for that. Seriously, I have not seen any author with a more cool bio picture than you.), the pink cat eared hat (for the flare points ^w^), and amazing humor used with excellent bloging skills. Yes, I’m probably missing some, but still, you see my point. With your logic, you still may not surpass the Gaiman-Day homunculus, but you are alot closer and and a whole lot cooler than you think.

But hang on Pat, you have only written one book…no? So perhaps you should consider re-visiting said coolness of the first two participants at the same stage of their careers? Because otherwise it’s like comparing ‘Escape From New York’ with ‘Avatar.’ Fledgling cool vs stupidly-big-budget-good-looking-cool, if you get my drift. But of course, I choose a James Cameron analogy because, well, he is a geek, and Snake Plisskin adds important cool kudos right from the get go (which is kind of where you are…I think…kind of, is that cool?

I don’t usually get the urge to post on people’s blogs.. the last person who’s blog I posted on was Eddie Campbell’s (graphic novelist and co writer of “From Hell” on which the movie was based) about 3 years ago after meeting him. Long story short – you sell yourself short. I haven’t read your book, but I plan to possibly next week while I am on holidays (and have been planing to for sometime after reading the first 2 pages not long after it was released – a big thing for me as it usually takes me a little longer to actually decide i like a book), a number of my friends rave about you, and your blog is one of the funniest things i have had the pleasure of reading for a while apart from Jennifer Fallons blog. You and Jen (although she has been around for a little longer then you) share a new writer coolness that isn’t often found these days. Awsome books and wikid sence of humour and a true love of their fans.

I like the idea of the Gaiman-Day scale, but the numbers are a little clunky. Too large, too wide of a range, and too many sig figs to remember. How about we take 2*log(G-D) to give us a nice simple-looking 10-scale?

Gaiman himself is a 9.4, Ms. Day is a 9.3, and even you come out at a modest 6.2 using your own harsh bonus multipliers.

Seriously Pat: (yes I used the word, too, so you’ll do think about it that way won’t you?)

Either did you stack so low as to not try and outdo your heroes and heroines and because you are just a way to humble person?

OR

Did you intentionally leave enough space for hundreds of forgot-the-adjective, numbered minions to post vigorously on how cool the blue lighted Nostradamus avatar and all you other achievements are, so you could bath in a flood of Pat-praising posts?

Scientifically speaking: I can follow you to the point were you add up Day and Gaiman to 100,000. This would only make sense to me if they were 100% distinctly cool, which they aren’t. Although I agree that they probably cover the whole breadth of coolness.Wont help in your final score but in % you will gain a little.

Epic blog anyways, will help you a lot when someone comes up with a (nerd/)geekness measure.

— Something completely different:You write fantasy so maybe you are interested in fantasy-like creatures, like the CopyPaste bird or more correcly lyre bird (in German Leierschwanz) – look it up in youtube just stumbled upon and needed to pass it on, bad (or good) for you that next thing I did was reading your blog.

Pat, Pat, Pat! This post alone gets you another *1.5 bonus! The real coolness factor for Gaiman, Day, Wheaton, Rothfuss is a true respect and appreciate for the fans (and I believe a lot of us ‘follow’ all of you). Just saying, the four of you together are as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider!

In my world, Pat, YOU are the reference point when figuring out degrees of cool. Even to my Gaiman-loving best friend. You’re the cat’s pajamas, man. Everyone else should be gauging themselves against you.

Genius statistic!But the less followers you have, the more intellectual coolness you’ve got, so you have to multiply your score by 1.4 for great Humor, then multiply it by 1.9 for your Wisdom. After that you know what’s your “Understandable-for-all-Coolness”, but if you take your intellectual uber-powers, you’d have to multiply your score with Universal-Genius, which would be around 70k points, which means you’re at least as cool as the other cool men and women. As the Word Verification says: SCREWEDYeah i love those verifications.I think i’m going to make a verification bar, where everyone has to enter a veryfication code to come in. Have yourself a pleasent afternoon (or evening, whatever. Here in austria it’s about 5 pm.).Ps.: screwed =)PPs: Wouldn’t ambrosius be a great name?

While Ms. Day is certainly hotter (as in girly-geek-hot) and Mr. Gaiman seems to have doppelgangerized himself (he is just everywhere) neither has risked, to my knowledge, paying their mortgage to help others. And that sir makes you supremely cool in my book.

And to that we must add the fact that you invented the most bitching system for magic I have ever found.

I have a question – what if a Gaiman-Day got together with a Day-Gaiman and they had a child Gaiman-Day-Day-Gaiman – or Day-Gaiman-Gaiman-Day – or… you get the idea. Would that offspring then be a New Universe of Cool Unto Its Own? Or is that just silly talk, icky, or something else all together?

so . . by your mesurement. where would joss whedon rate?? i mean he’s got the comic book, episodes, and movie multiplier . . . and an entire blog page made for him by his fans (whedonesque.com). Just curious.

I agree that inventing a new unit of measurement for coolness should definitley add to your score, as should Worldbuilders… Also, not rising up up slaying those those with entitlement issues has to count for something.

Frak Whedon… Awww hell I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. I’m just pissed because according to the Gaiman-Day scale I am somewhere around the same level of cool as a tree slug. Probably not even that because some funny frakker out there probably thinks tree slugs are the greatest ever. Nobody thinks that about me so, maybe a lamprey? Pretty sure nobody thinks lampreys are awesome.

Pat, You really are the coolest. You can’t measure cool in popularity with these figures though. I mean, to be fair, you only have widely published one cool thing (don’t get me wrong it is the COOLEST!) but you can’t expect to have the same readership or followers with one book. You are a fabulous person, with all the charity that you do and the way you are such an inspiration for uncool nerds who some day dream of being as awesome as you. Wait till your trilogy is finished, turned into a movie or series on HBO, watched endlessly in repeats on TNT, and THEN show me your figures.

On the subject of Gaiman-Day units. I have no problem with Felicia Day as the Queen of Geek Cool–she wins that title hands-down. And, I agree that Neil Gaiman is certainly a member of the Geek Cool royal family. Moving down the list, if someone had told me back in the 80’s that Wil Wheaton in a kilt could be disturbingly attractive I would have laughed myself sick. However, even considering Wil’s frowny hotness, Pat scores way, way cooler than him. The thing is, with cool, the minute you call yourself ultra cool you become immediately less cool, so Pat’s self-deprecation immediately raises his score, adding another multiplyer to the formula.

[fan gush] Pat, I fell in love with you the moment I read the line, “It was the cut-flower sound of a man waiting to die.” Throughout Name of the Wind, your prose takes my breath away. Writing as beautiful as yours rightfully takes time, and I will wait for Wise Man’s Fear however long it takes. [end fan gush]

Ahem. Returning to the discussion of Gaiman-Day units. Addressing logankstewart’s comment, “I’d like to see where Joss Whedon falls in on this scale,” I would argue that you can’t apply Gaiman-Day units to him. Joss Whedon totally breaks the curve.

Pat, your personal acolyte is appalled at your unfathomably low Gaiman-Day score. Should there not be some sort of bonus for us losers who don’t follow anyone on Facebook or GoodReads? (What you say? A librarian who doesn’t follow GoodReads. Well now that there is someone whose opinion I trust, I might!)OK, so once I log in to follow you on GoodReads you can up your score by a micropoint or two. Feel better now? Your coolness will soon increase!

Wow. This post was retweeted by Neil Gaiman who we’ve established as cool~

however, your post is so incredibly AWESOME that I, follower of Neil Gaiman and all around stalker chick extraordinnaire, am TEMPTED to defect to the Rothfuss camp.

(which probably Neil wouldn’t mind, except that i am one of his followers who is an actual-reader-and-not-a-bot, sooo, it could hurt a little bit).

You. Are. A. Rock N Roll STAR.

You settled the “what books to buy with the remainder of the barnes and noble gift cards i received from the many friends and family members who recoginize that my degree of coolness is in direct proportion to how many books i can read by supercool authors” dilemma.

thats some major interesting math, Pat. But you also have to remember time scale :) afterall, Gaiman has been writing and publishing major works a lot longer than you. He just has a bit of a head start is all. I am sure you will surpass even the master some day :)

In reference to the commenter above that pointed out that you have published one book so far, and are still maturing into your fame, compared to the accomplished Gaiman and Day, we in my biology geekdom would recommend that you normalize coolness units by dividing by books published.

Who gave you the calculator? No more science for you. Back to the writing desk. *whip crack*You remember what happened last time, when I found you in the basement with a file and a coke can making thermite….

Don’t know if somebody noticed already, got no time to read al posts, need to study for my exam in statistics tomorrow morning, oh the irony..

but my point being: Pat forgot to give himself a *1.2 medium bonus( awesome book + awesome blog).

also, because statistics are like lies for the advanced, we switch Pats beard from flair bonus to appearance bonus. o.k?

Now, with a bit of creativity we can argue that the initiative for worldbuilders adds to Pats flair bonus. If someone does not agree, please tell.

Since Worldbuilders is a great concept, it counts for at least a *1.3 bonus

Mr. Rothfuss, you are being to modest for not giving yourself these bonus opitons. only one positive multiplier for you? And three for Gaiman and Day? Its not fair, and you know it.

Therefore, I think I speak on behalf of everyone here when I say you deserve a modesty bonus. Lets say: .1 for every bonus you gave to them, and not to yourself. Earlier here I gave you already the appearance and medium bonus, so that leaves only the association bonus.: *1.1

Pat. This is kind of off topic, but it fits with the whole nerd/geek/coolness theme. Check out themovieblog.com. They have a list of The 20 nerd commandments. I laughed so hard i actually had tears rolling down my face! Have fun.

Pat, I think you need to add a couple hundred Gaimen-Day Units to your coolness for coming up with the System of Measurement for Coolness. And another hundred units for using the example of Alchemy in your explanation. May fortune smile upon you.

I can only hope you didn’t fall into some kind of singularity when exceeding the 100,000 Gainman-Days while you were writing this post…

Btw, now I can’t stop thinking about this imaginary conversation with Will Wheaton. Only in my head it’s more like in ‘Gamers.’ … “Stop Wheaton, or I smite thee with my mighty beard!” “Smite the with my mighty beard’?!?” “Oh, shut up!”

Ok… but what about mortals who don’t have fans? Is there a conversion for fans to friends? (In Facebook terms, obviously actual friends are closer to you and more important than individual fans) So if I know this really cool dude who is just some dude, not a celebrity with a fan page, how can I tell how cool that guy is?

WV: menet – Some sort of painter guy from like, France, or something. One of those 1800s guys who wore turtlenecks and smoked thin ciggys on long filter sticks and like, drank absinthe and bemoaned thier ennui for a living. You know. A douchebag.

I agree with countless posts before me. This blog alone, including the Lego argument, should multiply your coolness by many factors. No other blog is as entertaining as yours. That is worth something special!

“Brian: “I feel like I need a scale whenever I meet someone, so I can know if this is a really big author that I should know, or if they are new, or were big in the 80s or what. I have no idea, usually. Like…this guy is two Scalzis, or something.”

The problem I see with your math is that while Gaiman works well to define the top of the scale of coolness, there is the undefined matter of calibrating the zero point. And for absolute zero I have to think Will Wheaton is as appropriate a choice as anyone is likely to find.

First, add a vote for the most b*tching magic system. I heartily agree. Much better than pointing a wand and saying things in semi-Latin.

Second, you can add a good many points just by the fact that no other author I know (perhaps I just haven’t looked long enough) guarantees that he’ll sign your book if you send it and some goodies to him.

My brother, when he gets home from overseas in seven days, is going to get the best Christmas present ever because of you, and I believe that counts for a lot.

Indeed, you do sell yourself short. Many people have already enumerated the ways in which you do so, which leaves me free to point out (although I feel as if I am detracting from my above point by doing so) that you left out a media bonus multiplier for Felicia Day – music video. “Do You Want to Date My Avatar”, with nearly 7.5 million views on the Guild’s youtube channel alone, even allowing for repeated viewings by a single person, surely deserves at least an additional .1 to the MBM. Factor in iTunes sales and other site viewings, and that may rocket her up to Über-Empress-Geek-Queen status, leaving you (and Lego-Wheaton, and @nielhimself) in the veriest dust that ever was.

But you still rock. Name of the Wind is my most favoritest fantasy novel I’ve read in a long time, beating out even Robin Hobb, George R.R. Martin, and (well, almost) Neal Stephenson.

You are not cool. Face up to it. Neither am I nor any other blogobyte here. Cummulatively, we are as uncool as it gets…so really we are fridgidly, epicly frozen. Our lives are sad and small. Our math is completely wrong. I mean, seriously, read up on the chaos theory. Nothing can be determined. It is all random. As you analyse the Gaiman-Day problem, despite your attempt to orderly determine a solution to the question of cool, you will see the nonsensical randomness of it all…actually in the end, we may in fact be so uncool that the math will force the world to recognize us as a seperate society of fools so powerful we could control the universe!

Or, we could just say that your book rocks and we (repeat after me) “Can’t wait for Book 2” and that all authors are to be applauded for thier efforts to increase our brain function.